Squint 빔 분할을 통한 고해상도 SAR 영상 구현

Abstract

Airborne synthetic aperture radars(SARs) are vulnerable to geometric distortion when operated in the squinted mode. The polar format algorithm(PFA) is preferred owing to its convenient motion compensation, good image quality, and efficient computational performance. As a major drawback of the conventional PFA, the increase in data distortion under the forward-looking mode results in interpolation errors, thereby deteriorating image quality. In this paper, we propose a high-resolution SAR processing method based on the sub-aperture division PFA. In this approach, multiple antenna beams are imposed on extended areas divided by sub-aperture regions. Antenna beam steering is implemented from multiple platforms to simultaneously collect raw data from the sub-apertures. Thereafter, multiple sub-data images, each featuring low-resolution qualities, are processed in parallel to compensate for phase distortion and further merged to obtain a complete SAR image over an extended area. The results show that the synthesized SAR image yields an improved quality with enhanced resolution.